Obituary: Professor Ronald Fletcher

IN Donald G. MacRae's description of Professor Ronald Fletcher (obituary, 27 May) it is hard to recognise the man that I knew - a gentle and humorous man of wide learning and interests including music, writes J. Harvey-Rogers.

His direct and honest approach to sociology and to other disciplines won him a wide spectrum of friends outside the claustrophobic world of academic sociology - but alas to his disadvantage within it. His weekly political journalism revealed him to be a wise man of independent, sound and considerable political insight, and his local history films for Anglia Television, in which he was often the narrator, bequeath us a self-portrait of an unpretentious and very lovable Englishman.